Meet Umbrella: Mobile, Roaming and Everywhere Security by OpenDNS

After a lot of hard work and testing, Umbrella is finally here. Umbrella takes the existing OpenDNS business security offering and extends it dramatically to support roaming Macs, PCs and iOS devices, all managed under one Web-based dashboard.

It’s the only solution available today that protects nomadic workers who use iPhones, iPads, and Windows and Mac laptops, while also providing comprehensive network security for headquarters, distributed offices, retail locations and Wi-Fi hotspots.

This is game-changing for IT. For the last seven years we’ve watched as IT and network security administrators who have built up walls around their enterprise have lost visibility as their users and the traffic increasingly started moving outside the castle onto mobile devices and accessing cloud services.

To put it another way, when your users work from home, starbucks or on the road, and they are using Google Apps, Dropbox, Box or Salesforce, as an IT person, you’ve lost all visibility. We’re going to help you regain it, and then we’re going to help you manage the policy in a way that ensures the right security policy on the right device for the right user at the right time. And for the users, we’re going to deliver this in a way that puts the end-user experience at the forefront, with a focus on performance, efficacy and transparency.

We have also focused on an overall architecture that is designed to be easy to deploy, simple to manage and highly effective at blocking security threats.

I’m really proud of what we’ve built, and excited to offer Umbrella to you and your organization. OpenDNS has always been a company focused on innovation, and since that focus has given birth to many solutions that make the Internet better, it should be no surprise that we’ve built Umbrella to be unlike anything else available today. But there’s something special behind the unmatched security technology we’ve built. It’s that these security breakthroughs reflect the way we think about not just technology, but the people who use it, too.

But I’ve been talking a lot lately about why we built Umbrella to secure today’s nomadic workforce, and now that we’ve launched it’s time you heard from some of our early adopters. Here are some thoughts from our customers:

“Anyone who cares about network security, especially roaming users, will be very Interested in Umbrella. It’s a fantastic service.” – Ken Morse, CEO of Ilium Software

“Umbrella’s mobility solutions allow us to extend the solid security we use on our corporate network to wherever our employees choose to work, effectively protecting them 24/7.” — Randy Raw, Network Security Director at Veterans United Home Loans

Umbrella will be focused on serving businesses first. But, we know many long-time friends of OpenDNS are highly technical and might want to take Umbrella for a spin. So, for the next few days or so, I’ve decided to let anyone purchase a single-user license of Umbrella Mobility for just $20 a year. Try it out and let me know what you think. Think of it as a VPN to the cloud, with the ability to add security policies that you define.

And I owe you a word about VPNs — We know users hate VPNs — they increase latency and they decrease thruput. We want to turn that on it’s head. We have deployed our cloud security gateways all over the world, and we have more datacenters coming online over the coming months. We’re committed to creating an Internet security network that lives up to our vision.

If you want to learn more, you should check out Umbrella and I also hope you’ll join me on Nov. 28th for a webcast on how we’re redefining security for nomadic workers. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on what we’ve created. It’s just the beginning.